Pynchon and fascism

[Terrance]

> 
> I think Paul is asking us to read Introduction within a fictional context,
> not primarily to categorize it as a kind of fiction. So, for example, Ann
> Fabian has analyzed the requests of Union soldiers for government
> assistance after the War, and found they appropriate the language of slave
> narratives, that white veterans of the war describe themselves in ways
> developed in the autobiographical texts of slaves and exslaves. There is
> another critic (name forgotten) who works on A.A. narratives. By shearing
> off this whole practical dimension, these kinds of analyses attempt to
> study the literariness of these homely, vernacular narratives.

Right. I understand what Paul is writing. Do you understand what I'm
writing? 

> 
> Many of us do this all the time, and, in fact, haven't many folks on this
> list, I'm thinking of Malignd, Pynchonoid, The Great Quail, chosen names
> that deliberately imply at some level they are characters within a fictive
> world governed by a belief in the archetypal insights of Thomas Pynchon,
> and that list discussion constitutes some kind of an improvised
> participatory fiction that emulates intrinsic values within the exemplary
> fiction of Thomas Pynchon? One could actually analyze list discussion
> within a fictional context, although we are not explicitly writing
> fiction. I guess I'm wondering why you think a consideration of the
> Introduction in a fictional context should wait until kind of fiction can
> be conclusively determined or that Paul N. needs to even have a kind of
> fiction in mind.

It doesn't. It hasn't. It's good question. Give it some thought.